Tammy out of Time

by Cid Ricketts Sumner

  “Why should I be still? What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you see? Mr. Fernan is drawing Tammy.”

  “Tammy? Why in the world should he draw her?” She had dropped her voice but Tammy could hear just the same.

  “Because she has beautiful lines.”

  “The idea! She’s very odd-looking, that’s all. Why can’t he wait and do Barbara? Tammy’s had enough publicity.”

  Tammy said, in answer to Mr. Fernan’s lifted brows, “She doesn’t like it because I told them and they put it in the paper, about Grandpa’s being in jail. It looks like everything I do is wrong.”

  A sadness settled over her. Every time she got her hopes up that she was not so different from people, something came along to take her down and set her in a lowly place. Likely enough it was just because she was odd-looking that Mr. Fernan wanted to draw her.

  19.

  THE time of the Pilgrimage was passing. Tammy tried to delay its going, but the tighter she held to each moment, the faster it slipped through her fingers. It was a hurrying, pressed and filled-up time, and yet with all that was happening, there was something more for which she waited and which did not come. Pete had said that morning in the field, that it was a relief to get it all settled. Yet he didn’t act like one who had settled on anything. In the mornings and other times when the Pilgrimage was not carrying him away into the past, he seemed more withdrawn than ever, though maybe with one difference. There was a set look to his jaw. He was maybe thinking then of the life ahead of him, Tammy reflected, of the long days in an office that seemed stale and unprofitable to him, for all the money there might be.

  Barbara had a kind of triumph round her all the time. In her lovely rose ruffled dress, she was fair as the moon, an army with banners, taking Pete like a city. Tammy turned away from the sight of her sometimes, when she was laughing and talking with him, and calling, “Oh, Cousin Al, come here—I want you to hear this,” making up to Mr. Bissle like he was a bundle of myrrh.

  Other times, in the morning when she was helping clean, Tammy would call to Pete as he passed by. She would say, “I been out to look at the tomatoes. They’re sure doing fine.” Or again she would say, “You know, Pete, cattle is one thing hail don’t cut down in a moment. And once you get a start of cattle, they multiply and increase, give them time.”

  Another day when she was waiting for Mr. Fernan and Pete stopped by the steps for a moment, she told him something she had been thinking about the night before. “Pete?” she began with such earnestness that he laid down the sketch he had been turning this way and that to see if it really favored her.

  “What, Tammy?” He had the gentle way, the kindly look in his dark eyes, that always made her heart melt and her bones as water.

  “Pete, I been thinking. What you need is a little money to start you a herd of cattle.”

  “I’ve been thinking that for some time, Tammy.”

  “Well, I got money you could have.”

  “You? What do you mean, Tammy?”

  “Grandpa give it to me. He said, use it if I needed. It’s hid in a tin can, under the head of Celeste that died on Christmas day And——”

  “Celeste?” Pete puzzled.

  “You know, in the graveyard. The grave above ground. It’s right there, buried. I been thinking if it ain’t used I’ll be like the man that digged in the earth and hid his talent.”

  “Tammy,” Pete said, shaking his head, “would you do that for me?”

  “Sure I would, Pete. You could pay it back if you wanted. You could pay it back with...with usury.”

  Then Mr. Fernan came and Pete just smiled and shook his head and said, “Thanks just the same, Tammy. I won’t forget that.”

  Another morning when she was posing again, he came from the front of the house with a newspaper in his hand. “Hey, Tammy, look here,” he said. “Your grandpa’s in the paper again.”

  “Goshamighty,” Tammy said, “what’s happened now?”

  “He’s all right. It just seems that the good ladies of Forestville have decided it’s a shame to have so godly a man in jail. May I interrupt a minute, Mr. Fernan?”

  Mr. Fernan laid aside his pencil and studied his drawing. “Time she was having a little rest. We have been hard at it.”

  Pete dropped down on the steps beside Tammy and opened the paper for her to see. She read the headline: OLD DEADWOOD REFUSES TO LEAVE JAIL. She turned to Pete. “Now what does that mean? How could he be leaving when they put him in there by law?”

  “There’s more about it down here,” Pete pointed out. “The ladies persuaded the judge to dismiss the case.”

  Tammy bent over the paper, reading the fine print. “On being told that he was to be released from jail today, Old Deadwood, self-styled prophet of the penitentiary, berated the judge for his leniency, declaring that he will not be a party to such inconsistency on the part of the law. I ain’t got a notion of leaving till my time is up,’ he said. ‘Trouble with this country is it’s too wishy-washy and this-here is just another instance of it. Let the judge stand his ground. I mean to stand mine.’ A number of prominent citizens have recently been attending the services at the jail, and we have it on good authority that Judge Derryberry expects to be one of those in attendance next Sunday. ‘Thirty years on the bench,’ he is reported to have remarked, ‘and this is something new to me.’ Old Deadwood has already announced his text, ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,’ and he hopes the judge will be present.”

  “Well, I declare,” Tammy said. “Grandpa has always been itching to get after shilly-shallying in high places. Looks like he’s going to do it.”

  Mr. Fernan said, “It is something to which I look forward, meeting your grandfather, Tammy. He is a man after my heart.”

  “He is an original character, if there ever was one,” Pete told him. “These years on the river he has done a great deal of thinking, and his ideas are worth hearing.” He turned to Tammy. “One thing I’m glad of: that he isn’t coming to take you back to the Ellen B. You can’t possibly leave with all these swarms of people coming especially to see you.”

  “Do they come to see me?” Tammy asked with wonder.

  “Of course.” Pete rose. “I’ll tell you something else. The committee had been talking about taking Brenton Hall off the Pilgrimage list. They do that sometimes, if a place isn’t kept up. But you’ve done more for it than two coats of paint and a new roof.” At the foot of the steps, he turned and looked at Tammy as she took her pose again. “We couldn’t let you go, anyway, Tammy.”

  It was something to think about and treasure and remember, Pete’s saying that. All the rest of the morning she kept hearing how he had said it. “We couldn’t let you go, Tammy.” It made a kind of song in her heart.

  But by dinnertime clouds were blowing across the sky, darkening the earth and threatening rain every minute. There could be no ice water in the garden today. Everything had to be inside, and the rain, beginning soon after the hour of the Pilgrimage, kept many people away. Pete did not come out to do his part because she did not do hers. There was no room on the rain-spattered porch. It was cool and nobody cared for ice water to drink. So Tammy could sing naught but sad songs this day, because of missing Pete and their play acting, and because she could see how Barbara came often from the dining room to stay with Pete in the front hall. Tammy could hear her laughing and talking with Pete there and welcoming those who came, as if she asked them into her own home.

  Tammy was singing about Lady Nancy Belle whose lover came too late and found her in the churchyard, when she heard the sound of a truck in the driveway. Grandpa was climbing down from the truck; he was coming through the drizzling rain across the garden toward the ell steps. He was coming to take her home to the Ellen B., she thought, and in the midst of her singing the tears came slowly down her cheeks. Standing, waiting for him to come up the steps, she finished the song and thought it was lucky it was sad, because then maybe the people standing around would think
her tears a part of her pretending. They were clapping for her when Grandpa got to the top of the steps and gave her a great hug. Then he held her at arm’s length. “Hell’s bells, honey, I never knowed before how much you favored your grandma!”

  “Do I, Grandpa?” She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “It was Miss Renie fixed me up like this. And Mrs. Brent give me the notion of acting out the story. Only today, the rain come.”

  “I read about you in the paper, child, and it sure made me proud.”

  “I been reading about you, Grandpa. Are you...free?”

  “Well, in a way, honey, except for myself keeping me to it, according to my principles and disregarding that slipshod judge. I got a chance to ride to Fairhaven with a man coming this way, and so I says I’d just come by to see how you was doing.”

  “And you didn’t come to take me back to the Ellen B.?” she cried, feeling like dancing and singing all at once in spite of the rain.

  Grandpa shook his head. “It don’t look like the time is yet come for that, honey. There’s still work for Old Deadwood in the vineyard of the Lord. My sentence ain’t yet fulfilled and I don’t figger on cutting it short.”

  Tammy drew a deep breath of relief. Then, the people being mostly gone, she led him to where Mr. Fernan sat in Grandma’s chair that was set inside, near the kitchen door today. Mr. Fernan told how he was making the pictures of her so she could be in his great painting.

  “I make the quick sketches,” he said, holding out his drawing for Grandpa to see and marvel at, because it was so like her. “She is to be the central figure.” Then he went on to tell how the painting would be in a great building in New York and how it was to show the past and the present too, and the discoveries of science and the state of the world and how people today were in a confusion, looking back always with fear and longing to the past.

  “Yessir, that’s the truth about present-day people,” Grandpa said, sitting on the iron rail where the drip from the eaves fell on the back of his hat and rolled off in a little shower to the ground. “They put me in mind of the goofus bird, for a fact.”

  “What does the...the goofus bird do?” Mr. Fernan asked.

  “It flies backwards all the time,” Grandpa said. “It don’t give a durn where it’s going; all it cares about is where it’s been.”

  “Exactly,” Mr. Fernan nodded. “I shall have a goofus bird in my painting, if you can tell me how it looks.”

  “Well,” Grandpa pushed his hat still farther back on his head so he could scratch and think, “now you mention it, I don’t know as I ever seen one to know it. But I imagine it’s a kind of heavy-bodied, long-necked bird, something like a cross between a crane and a wild duck, with a touch of pelican throwed in just for meanness.”

  Mr. Fernan rubbed his hands together with pleasure. “I can see it plainly. It is what I need—just back of Tammy I shall place it, and above, against the sky. Very good indeed. I am grateful to you for the idea.”

  Tammy stood in her long calico dress, her hands clasped before her, looking to one and then the other as they talked. She was proud of Grandpa as he went on to talk about how he was trying to gather up the best out of the past, to save its faith and its willingness to venture without fear. He told of how he tried to give folks things to believe in and to go on. “We got to have a new religion and a new philosophy built on what parts of the Bible will fit in with the findings of man’s reasoning mind in a scientific way,” he said. “We got to throw out the parts of all our religions that don’t make sense in the light of this day and hang onto the rest—and that’s a plenty, I tell you. That’s what I’m apreaching, because that’s what I come to believe during my sojourn on the river and my meditations in the swamp.”

  Tammy laughed. “Sounds like you’s fixing to preach Mr. Fernan a sermon, Grandpa.”

  Grandpa said, “No, I ain’t got the time today, much as I’d like to.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” Mr. Fernan said. “What church do you serve, Mr. Dinwoodie?”

  “No church at all, sir. The churches don’t take to me, because I got no education excepting the Bible and common sense and what I pick up here and there and think up in my mind. And I don’t hold with churches because they done got too filled up with hocus-pocus and too emptied of the true teachings of the Lord.”

  Mr. Fernan nodded, agreeing, and Grandpa added, “Looks like you and me is fermenting the same barrel of mash, sir. Seems like there’s some hope for the world when two folks like us, going in by different bungs, come out the same spigot.”

  Then Pete joined them and welcomed Grandpa and begged him to stay for a visit. “We’d be so glad to have you,” he said.

  “And I’d be proud to stay in this mighty fine place you got here. Yessir, the Lord’s done set you down in a wide place, Pete. But I got to go along now. Maybe toward the end of the week I’ll come up and make you a little visit, the Lord willing.” He spat a mouthful of tobacco juice down on the flower bed and shook Pete’s hand and Mr. Fernan’s. “I just run by to see how my little girl was doing.”

  “She’s doing all right,” Mr. Fernan said.

  “That’s good; that sounds mighty fine to me,” Grandpa said, giving her a good-by hug. “I ain’t doing so bad myself, honey,” he added. “They tell me that if I want to be assistant jailer any time, the job is mine.”

  “Why, Grandpa! But the Ellen B.—and me——”

  Grandpa chuckled and shook the water from his hat brim. “Don’t you worry, child. I got my eye on you all the time. Just you keep on like you’re doing, and I’ll be seeing you soon.” He bowed again to Mr. Fernan and looked from Pete to Tammy and back again. “It’s all in the Lord’s hands. He ain’t failed me yet.” And having said that, he went away through the gray evening.

  Tammy, watching him go, thought again as she had the day at the jail, that Grandpa had a long head on him, there was no two ways about it. She looked round to Pete to see if he knew what Grandpa was leaving in the Lord’s hands, but Pete was looking toward the hall doorway where Barbara stood. Tammy’s heart sank, for Barbara was beautiful beyond words as she came toward them with a shine in her eyes and warmth and a glow to her bare arms and shoulders and the pure swell of her bosom above the rose-colored dress. Pete moved to meet her. Pete was like a summer bug, drawn to the light.

  Barbara swished her rose skirts past Tammy and came up to Mr. Fernan who was still sitting in Grandma’s chair. “I’m Barbara Cray, Mr. Fernan, and you don’t know me from Adam, but I know you, of course.”

  Mr. Fernan would have risen but that she waved him down again. “Yes, Mam’selle?”

  “I was wondering if you would like to go in with us to see the dress rehearsal of the Rebel Ball. We’ve been working on the dances in little groups for weeks and now it’s really something. And if you want to make some sketches of the dancers, this night would be better than later when the big crowds will be there. It’s awfully artistic.” She smiled down at him, tilting her head to one side and showing a dimple in her cheek.

  Tammy, watching her, knew that she was wanting Mr. Fernan to draw her picture. Likely, Mrs. Brent had not mentioned how she had asked Mr. Fernan yesterday to make a sketch of Barbara, and how he had said no thank you, it was an ordinary type and he preferred something more subtle and rare. Mrs. Brent had been furious.

  “Thank you-so much,” Mr. Fernan began now with a slow inclination that was like a bow. “It is so kind of you.”

  “Then you can ride in with Pete and me, and Pete can bring you back.”

  Pete said, “I’ll be delighted.”

  “So very kind,” Mr. Fernan went on as if there had been no interruption, “but I do not believe it would interest me.”

  “You mean...you don’t want to go?” Barbara stared at him, her mouth open in surprise.

  “Exactly, thank you,” Mr. Fernan said. “You have, I think, too much of the past here. One grows weary of it. On all sides I hear it said, ‘My grandfather was old Judge Soso; my
great-uncle, Colonel Soso....A thousand slaves we had. The great balls—we duplicate one for you so that you may come into our dream of the past.’ No, I have too much. You do not look enough to the present and to the future.”

  Barbara looked set back for a second, then she waved to Mr. Bissle who was coming in from the drive and said, “Oh, some of us are old-fashioned and all, Mr. Fernan, but when it comes to living, we’re as up-to-date as the next. You ought to see our country club at Longhaven if that’s the kind of thing you want. All modernistic, and as smart a crowd as you would find anywhere and a hot jazz band. And if you want to see an up-to-date house you ought to see the one Ernie has just bought. At least I think he’s closed the deal.”

  “Ernie has bought a house?” Pete’s tone was incredulous.

  “Sure he has—that white modernistic job on the country club road. Every gadget and convenience——” She broke off to welcome Mr. Bissle. “Hey, Cousin Al, come here. Mr. Fernan is sick of antiques, he wants something modernistic, and I want you to convince him we’ve got that, too. Didn’t you say our country club is as swell as any in New York?”

  “Sure it is,” Mr. Bissle agreed, shaking the rain from his hat “Air-conditioned and everything. Swell joint.”

  Barbara slid her hand through his arm. “What’s more, you liked the Rebel Ball too, didn’t you?”

  “Now that’s really something,” Mr. Bissle said. “Hollywood could take notes on how that’s put on. What you need though, Barbara, is some decent advertising—mass-psychology appeal, that sort of thing. ‘See the Ante-Bellum Belle! Who Put the l’Amour into Glamour’—all that kind of thing.”

  “Oh, Cousin Al, you’d really put us on the map. Heavens, I’ve got to dash and change.” Barbara picked up her skirts and ran along the porch toward her room. “I’ll be ready in a minute, Pete,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Okay, Barbara.”

  Tammy, seeing his eyes follow her as she hurried along the ell porch, drew a long sigh. This happened every night—Pete drove Barbara in to town, they went to dinner and to the rehearsal, dancing together as she had seen them that first night. She would be glad when the ball was over.